'People should sort this mess'

Margaret Humphreys has spent 23 years campaigning for the victims of forced childhood migration. This week, finally, Gordon Brown is due to apologise on behalf of Britain for separating them from their families

Humphreys’ own father, mother and grandmother died before she was out of her teens. Photograph: Fabio De Paola

Next Wednesday, if everything goes to plan, Gordon Brown will rise, approach the dispatch box, and make a short speech to the nation. In the afternoon he will expand upon it – directly, this time, to a group of people who have waited decades to hear what he has to say.

Everyone there will be well acquainted with disappointment. But they can't help hoping that finally a British prime minister will say all the right things: that he will explain exactly why tens of thousands of British children were rounded up, told their families were dead, and shipped off to work in the colonies; that he will offer the help they need to trace and rejoin their lost families; that he will apologise unreservedly.

Perhaps that is one reason why feelings are running so high at the Child Migrants Trust in Nottingham, a cosy house where Margaret Humphreys has spent the past 23 years listening to the stories of child migrants, co-ordinating searches for lost children and lost parents, and making sure they have the support they need once they have found each other – if they ever do. The walls are covered in photographs: children being herded onshore in Australia, just before being separated from siblings and sent to institutions throughout the country; children, quite small, working on building sites; and then those children, grown up, in their 50s and 60s, in tentatively patched-together family groups, learning how to smile together at a camera; or, in one case, kneeling at a grave, the reunion having come too late.

Humphreys, whose working days begin at 5am and often end 14 hours later, is a handsome and, at the moment, exhausted and slightly brittle woman. Fierce protectiveness of the migrants and decades of experience of how venal authorities (the British and Australian governments, the Catholic church, children's charities) can be, combined with what she calls, in her 1994 book Empty Cradles: One Woman's Fight to Uncover Britain's Most Shameful Secret, a "horror" of journalists, have produced a jagged vigilance. A shy woman, her well-intentioned attempts to erase herself from the picture can have the paradoxical effect of seeming hubristic. Of a generation, at 65, that is often uncomfortable with our latter-day ease with self-reflection, she is made defensive, too, by requests to examine her motives and personal feelings. We ended up having two conversations – one in which we talked at tense cross-purposes, then another, far more conciliatory.

Humphreys was working as a child protection officer when she received the first of a series of letters from Australia, from a woman called Madeleine (not her real name). Madeleine had once lived in Nottingham; she wasn't sure if her name and birthdate were right; she wanted to know who she was. Could Humphreys help? By coincidence Humphreys had just encountered another woman, in a post-adoption group she ran in Nottingham. An adoptee, Marie had eventually discovered she had a brother, and that he had been shipped to Australia as a child. And so the letter snagged in Humphreys' conscience, and would not let go. She managed to trace Madeleine's mother, and 40 years after they were separated, reintroduced them.

But what was going on? Why were four-year-old British children being sent to institutions in Australia? She put ads in Australian newspapers, asking people with similar stories to come forward. A dozen or so did, so she took annual leave, and, with an Observer journalist (the only way she could raise the money for the trip), set off for Australia to meet them. On her return, with the help of her husband Mervyn (who enrolled for a doctorate at Nottingham University in order to have easy access to the archives) she investigated their situations, "And of course we soon discovered that the parents hadn't died. They were very much alive. And that was quite a revelation, and quite a moment."

Expecting that the Observer piece, published in July 1987, would bring many more migrants out of the woodwork, Humphreys established the Child Migrants Trust. It received hundreds of queries, all of which Humphreys began to investigate. Four months later the pressure was so great she had to give up the day job she had had for 15 years. When a documentary, Lost Children of Empire, was screened in 1989 the trust was inundated. But even that was nothing compared to the reaction when The Leaving of Liverpool, a dramatisation of the story, was screened in 1992. In Australia the phones were overwhelmed; in Britain helplines received 10,000 calls.

Children have been exported from Britain since the 1600s, though the practice only gained real pace in the late 1800s: from then until the 1920s, 100,000 were sent to Canada alone. Many of those who sent them seemed to have believed they were doing good, giving the children a new beginning; there seems, however, to have been no oversight of what the quality of this new beginning might be. In Canada, for instance, they were herded into distribution centres then sent, as free labour, to farms all across the country.

After the second world war many families found themselves unable to look after young children, and so put them into care, promising to pick them up again; to these children were added those of single mothers bowing to social stigma and giving their children up for adoption. This generation of children found themselves on the receiving end both of thoughtless do-gooding, and of the anxieties of empire: "If we do not supply from our own stock," said the archbishop of Perth, welcoming a shipload of boys in 1938, "we are leaving ourselves all the more exposed to the menace of the teeming millions of our neighbouring Asiatic races." (Some were sent to Zimbabwe and deliberately inculcated with a sense of their own superiority. Humphreys was struck by how many had settled into privileged lives, and were not that interested in being helped.)

This wave of migration, which took an estimated 7,000 to 10,000 white children to Australia, did not end until 1967. Although many were told they were orphans when they left, Humphreys says she has encountered only one, in 23 years, who actually was. If they had siblings when they arrived, they were often separated from them, too. "And of course, there was this element of deceit, which was quite shocking then, and is quite shocking now, to tell children their parents are dead when they're not, to tell them they have no one, when they have, to tell them their country didn't want them, that they were the children of British whores."

Thus they were, as she puts it, "exquisitely vulnerable", and for some of them this was compounded by a through-going exploitation of that vulnerability. A couple of thousand boys were sent to Catholic orphanages, among them Bindoon Boys' Town, a Christian Brothers establishment just north of Perth. "We slept on straw mattresses on a concrete verandah," John Hennessey told the Telegraph 15 years ago. "In winter the rain came down on us. The sound of the silence out there in the bush was deafening." At 12 years old he received a flogging from a 6ft 5in, 18-stone Brother that left him with a stammer for the rest of his life. Yet even he was luckier than the boys who as well as being put to work constructing buildings, were sexually abused. One child migrant came to Humphreys to tell her of being five years old, tied to a tree, repeatedly raped, then left to fend for himself.

Humphreys says that a theme through all the stories she's heard is one of absolute loneliness. One migrant told her that it was like "having a piece of ice inside you all the time. And I remember thinking, at the time, that that ice has got to melt, has got to gently melt away and be replaced by something that has meaning, that gives the opportunity to have an understanding of your life and your childhood."

Humphreys, who grew up in Nottingham, lost first her father when she was 12 and then her mother and grandmother before she was out of her teens, and so has a deep understanding of early bereavement, if not of this particular species of absolute loss. In fact, she says, "when you talk to people, they want to have a bereavement. They want to feel. They say, 'I want to feel something Margaret, I can't feel anything.'" She also, having been born in 1944, has a bank of memories that chime with the fragments that migrants can remember of their own histories: the clothing of 1950s Britain; the music. At the Child Migrants Trust house in Perth previously deeply hidden stories and hopes are often told against a soundtrack of Fats Domino, Bobby Vee or Connie Francis.

She felt those stories as "a great responsibility. I used to ask why they hadn't shared them before. The thing that was interesting was that I was seen as somebody from home, someone who wasn't from their own community. Perhaps also at times they recognised a vulnerability [in me]. I was often there on my own, working with them, learning and listening. I don't know, but what I do know is that they were able to respond very well."

The stories took a severe toll on her. She didn't take a holiday for seven years, and missed all her daughter's birthdays bar her 18th in five of those years. Have her children resented her for her long absences, of up to four months at a time? When I first broached the topic I got a terse, "This really isn't about my children, is it. It's about other people's children"; now she says, "if they did, they haven't told me. I wish it hadn't happened, but it's rather selfish when you think about people who haven't had a birthday card in their whole life." A pause. "Though that doesn't make birthdays unimportant – it makes them in a sense more important – they're significant events in family life."

Alone in a hotel room, in the early 90s, she haemorrhaged and woke to find the bed soaked with blood – but initially refused to go to hospital because she had work to do. One year, unable to cope with the disjuncture between her own family's normality and the migrants' unhappiness, she nearly cancelled Christmas; it went ahead for her own children, but she spent much of it in tears. She couldn't bear to be touched, or let her children go to carol services, because she couldn't separate the church, any church, from all the ill she had seen. She lost weight, and didn't sleep, and was eventually diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder; she had to be professionally debriefed.

It hasn't helped that it has all gone on far longer than she ever expected. At first Humphreys thought all she had to do was tell people what was happening. There would be outrage, and "people would want to sort out this terrible mess. Not the past – that's complex. But this. This solution" – of helping people who wanted to find their families. But in 1993 John Major told parliament that "any concern about the treatment of the children in another country is essentially a matter for the authorities in that country" and effectively washed his hands of it. It took until 1998 for the House of Commons select committee on health to begin an inquiry; this resulted in a travel fund of £1m, to run for three years and, from Frank Dobson, then health secretary, "sympathy and sincere regrets".

The Child Migrants Trust, previously dependent on donations, and staffed by Humphreys, her husband, one social worker and a volunteer, now has nine staff, split between the UK and Australia, who deal with more than 1,000 migrants in Australia alone. Ideally, each migrant will be coaxed to tell their story; the trust will then look for the family. Humphreys was particularly moved, recently, to find that the mother of an 81-year-old woman was still alive. Then the social workers will work with all concerned to help them come to terms with the damage.

Time is of the essence. "Every day counts. Even over the past two months, in the lead-up to this apology, three child migrants lost their mothers. All of them had met their mothers, and had started to make a relationship, started to look at the past together, but they could not come to the funerals, to say goodbye, to do what most of us take for granted, because of a lack of finances."

An ideal apology would include a fund to pay for those flights. "That's what the child migrants want. They've said many times that an apology without reparation would be very difficult to accept." (Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd's apology to children abused in care last November, while welcome, did not come with cash.) At the least they need an official recognition of all that they have been through. "If you've been separated from your origins and identity since you were a small child – and it was reinforced throughout your childhood that not just your family – that's bad enough – but your country didn't want you … That's why this apology is so important to people's recovery – it's the recognition, the acknowledgement that all of these things have suddenly been understood. When we talk about apology – and we talk about this apology all the time – we ask, 'What do you need in this apology? What will make you feel better? And nearly everyone says, 'Just the truth.'" Her voice drops and slows. "'Just. The. Truth. Please.'"